The old road home
Part of the Blogging A to Z Challenge. I’m blogging every day in April, except Sundays, thematically from A to Z. Find out more here.
Wide open spaces. Something I always yearn for. Dream of when it’s taken away. Find my way back to. I always loved being alone. My friends couldn’t understand why I wanted to live off a back road in the country by myself. Those wide open spaces called to me.
As a child I roamed the woods with my two dogs. They were my guardians, my friends. I wandered ancient paths around craggy stone walls and over dim forest floors. I spread out on mountain meadows, in spots I just knew no one else had traversed across. I climbed knobby trees and sang to woodland creatures. I hid in nooks, alone in the world, and content.
Wide open spaces provides spaces in our hearts and minds to grow and create. Spaces where we can find peace and love.
Laura Armstrong, in my novel A Human Element, embraces wide open spaces as I do. A part of her childhood is from mine.
Laura sings to the open world as I did:
Laura balanced her feet on the branches and spread her arms out wide. Her chestnut hair blew behind her in the warm, July breeze. She owned this piece of the world in the little town of Coopersville, New York. She overlooked the sloped meadows and woods around the farmhouse. Feeling confident in her footing in the tree, she took a deep premier-pharmacy.com/product/premarin/ breath and sang to the woods. She sang to the trees swaying to her tune and the animals chattering around her. She sang to the ancient craggy mountains before her. She sang to the birds claiming the sky and the creek that tumbled along its way.
Laura dreams as I dream in my wide open spaces:
She unzipped the sagging, worn bag and brought out the knotty old blanket she always carried with her. She never knew when she might need it. She could find herself drawn through thick woods to where a window opened onto a glorious field of soft blowing grasses. Then, she would glide through the golden rushes and rest amongst nature’s soft noise to stare at blue skies. It was magical how a field came to be in the middle of the woods, a bare, open plain encased by uneven and roaming rock walls. Maybe it was a magical meadow that appeared just as she came upon it and disappeared when she left. She loved the movie Brigadoon about a town in Scotland appearing one day every one-hundred years. The town stayed the same while the world changed around it in a flash.
The Dixie Chicks sing it. She Needs Wide Open Spaces.
She needs wide open spaces
Room to make her big mistakes
She needs new faces
She knows the high stakes
Do you dream of wide open spaces? Have you found them?
And what do you find in them? What do they bring you?